Weird

[fbhjr]

So, at the symposium today I was taking pictures of the items brought by the guest of honor. (See my other wrightup: http://fbhjr.livejournal.com/64861.html)
Jeff, who runs the event asked me to take as many good pictures of them as I could so he could use some in the center’s news letter.

So, these are the three swords the guest of honor brought. Nice, old, nothing too out of the ordinary.
The one at the top is big. But, I didn’t notice anything special.

So, when I took this picture, I was surprised to see glowing shapes on the blade of the sword.

Yes, with a flash, the etching right under the rust layer glow.
They are very hard to see without the flash. If you lean over the sword and squint at it, you can see them.
So, gold etching under a layer of rust reacts to a flash.

But, when I first looked down at the display on the camera, my first thought was “why are there shapes there the camera sees that I can’t?”
It was spooky.
Cool, but spooky.

Comments

[palusbuteo.livejournal.com]

sort of like The One Ring ;D

...Or Orcbane?

[yebo.livejournal.com]

UV? The flash puts out some....

The CCD in the camera is sensitive to a broader spectrum than your eye, and is usually linear in processing (the log scaling is usually done in software on the camera). I don't know if you remember the whole Sony issue from a couple of years ago with a camera that saw so far into the infrared that it could see through clothing in certain circumstances at the beach.

[fbhjr.livejournal.com]

I think it has more to do with the rust than with the etching.
With the flash the blade looks much more silver than the dark brown it looked with the naked eye.
So, I don't think it made the etching appear, so much as the rust fade out.
That could be UV or IR.